1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a camera having a live view display function. The live view display function is to display a series of images repeatedly acquired by an image pickup device on a display device as a moving picture. The live view display function is also called a through-image display function or an electronic finder function.
2. Description of the Related Art
While traditional cameras were designed to view a subject image through an optical finder, a growing number of recent digital cameras have incorporated a function, so-called live view display function, for displaying live images acquired by an image pickup device continuously on a display device such as an LCD monitor or the like. These digital cameras having the live view display function may have an optical finder or not.
Such a live view display function causes no parallax, for example, and it is effective for macro shooting and the like. For this and other reasons, various examples of including the live view display function in the single-lens reflex digital camera have been proposed.
For example, there is proposed a digital single-lens reflex camera capable of displaying a live view, in which an optical finder display mode and an electronic finder display mode are selectable (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-369042). In this digital single-lens reflex camera, when the electronic finder display mode is selected, a movable mirror is retracted from the shooting optical path and a focal-plane shutter is fully opened to guide light of a subject image to an image pickup device in order to display a series of acquired subject images continuously on an LCD monitor.
In the meantime, upon activation of this type of live view display function, the movable mirror has to be retracted from the shooting optical path. On the other hand, the movable reflecting mirror needs to be moved into the shooting optical path to perform automatic focusing control (AF) using a TTL phase-difference method generally applied to the conventional single-lens reflex camera. For this reason, the live view display is stopped before the conventional single-lens reflex camera performs TTL phase-difference AF.
In addition, in the conventional single-lens reflex camera, the shutter charge operation and the retraction of the movable reflecting mirror are performed concurrently.